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Sometimes it’s tough to pull lessons of any sort from our confusing world, but let me mention one obvious (if little noted) case where that couldn’t be less true: the American military and its wars. Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. has been in a state of more or less permanent war in the Greater Middle East and northern Africa. In those years, it’s been involved in a kaleidoscopic range of activities, including full-scale invasions and occupations, large-scale as well as pinpoint bombing campaigns, drone strikes, special ops raids, advisory missions, training programs, and counterinsurgency operations. The U.S. military has fought regular armies, insurgencies, and terror groups of all sorts, Shiites as well as Sunnis. The first war of this era, in Afghanistan — a country Washington declared “liberated” in 2002 — is still underway 16 years later (and not going well). The second war, in Iraq, is still ongoing 13 years later. From Afghanistan to Libya, Syria to Yemen, Iraq to Somalia, the U.S. military effort in these years, sometimes involving “nation building” and enormous “reconstruction” programs, has left in its wake a series of weakened or collapsed states and spreading terror outfits. In short, no matter how the U.S. military has been used, nothing it’s done has truly worked out.

Now, we are about to enter the Trump era in which a series of retired generals, previously involved in these very wars, may end up running parts of the government or directly advising the president-elect on what course to take in the world. As Trump said in his recent interview with the New York Times, speaking of appointing retired General James Mattis as secretary of defense, “I think it’s time maybe, it’s time for a general. Look at what’s going on. We don’t win, we can’t beat anybody, we don’t win anymore. At anything.”

Nonetheless, you don’t have to be either a genius or a general to draw a simple enough lesson from these last 15 years of American war, even if it’s not Trump’s lesson: don’t do it. Of course, the new crew (aka the old crew) will naturally have ideas about how to “utterly destroy ISIS” and fulfill the president’s other promises in ways different from those already used. They will undoubtedly convince themselves that, unlike their predecessors (who just happen to be them), they have answers to the conundrum of how to effectively prosecute the war on terror. They will not, in other words, have learned the obvious lesson of these years and will, in some fashion, once again apply U.S. military power to the Greater Middle East and northern Africa — and whatever they do, however successful it may look in its early moments, it’s a guarantee that further disaster will ensue sooner or later. Guaranteed as well: that vast region will be “greater” only in terms of the ever vaster expanses of rubble where cities and towns used to be; and our “empire of chaos” there will continue to blow back here as well. It will come home in expense, in frustration, and in god knows what other ways.

Rest assured of one thing, it won’t be pretty, either there or here, a point made by TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, while doing something that, strangely enough, has scarcely been done in all these years of war: evaluating the performance of America’s generals. Tom

Winning
Trump Loves to Do It, But American Generals Have Forgotten How
By Andrew J. Bacevich

President-elect Donald Trump’s message for the nation’s senior military leadership is ambiguously unambiguous. Here is he on 60 Minutes just days after winning the election.

Trump: “We have some great generals. We have great generals.”

Lesley Stahl: “You said you knew more than the generals about ISIS.”

Trump: “Well, I’ll be honest with you, I probably do because look at the job they’ve done. OK, look at the job they’ve done. They haven’t done the job.”

In reality, Trump, the former reality show host, knows next to nothing about ISIS, one of many gaps in his education that his impending encounter with actual reality is likely to fill. Yet when it comes to America’s generals, our president-to-be is onto something. No doubt our three- and four-star officers qualify as “great” in the sense that they mean well, work hard, and are altogether fine men and women. That they have not “done the job,” however, is indisputable — at least if their job is to bring America’s wars to a timely and successful conclusion.

Trump’s unhappy verdict — that the senior U.S. military leadership doesn’t know how to win — applies in spades to the two principal conflicts of the post-9/11 era: the Afghanistan War, now in its 16th year, and the Iraq War, launched in 2003 and (after a brief hiatus) once more grinding on. Yet the verdict applies equally to lesser theaters of conflict, largely overlooked by the American public, that in recent years have engaged the attention of U.S. forces, a list that would include conflicts in Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.

Granted, our generals have demonstrated an impressive aptitude for moving pieces around on a dauntingly complex military chessboard. Brigades, battle groups, and squadrons shuttle in and out of various war zones, responding to the needs of the moment. The sheer immensity of the enterprise across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa — the sorties flown, munitions expended, the seamless deployment and redeployment of thousands of troops over thousands of miles, the vast stockpiles of material positioned, expended, and continuously resupplied — represents a staggering achievement. Measured by these or similar quantifiable outputs, America’s military has excelled. No other military establishment in history could have come close to duplicating the logistical feats being performed year in, year out by the armed forces of the United States.

Nor should we overlook the resulting body count. Since the autumn of 2001, something like 370,000 combatants and noncombatants have been killed in the various theaters of operations where U.S. forces have been active. Although modest by twentieth century standards, this post-9/11 harvest of death is hardly trivial.

Yet in evaluating military operations, it’s a mistake to confuse how much with how well. Only rarely do the outcomes of armed conflicts turn on comparative statistics. Ultimately, the one measure of success that really matters involves achieving war’s political purposes. By that standard, victory requires not simply the defeat of the enemy, but accomplishing the nation’s stated war aims, and not just in part or temporarily but definitively. Anything less constitutes failure, not to mention utter waste for taxpayers, and for those called upon to fight, it constitutes cause for mourning.

By that standard, having been “at war” for virtually the entire twenty-first century, the United States military is still looking for its first win. And however strong the disinclination to concede that Donald Trump could be right about anything, his verdict on American generalship qualifies as apt.

Never-Ending Parade of Commanders for Wars That Never End

That verdict brings to mind three questions. First, with Trump a rare exception, why have the recurring shortcomings of America’s military leadership largely escaped notice? Second, to what degree does faulty generalship suffice to explain why actual victory has proven so elusive? Third, to the extent that deficiencies at the top of the military hierarchy bear directly on the outcome of our wars, how might the generals improve their game?

As to the first question, the explanation is quite simple: During protracted wars, traditional standards for measuring generalship lose their salience. Without pertinent standards, there can be no accountability. Absent accountability, failings and weaknesses escape notice. Eventually, what you’ve become accustomed to seems tolerable. Twenty-first century Americans inured to wars that never end have long since forgotten that bringing such conflicts to a prompt and successful conclusion once defined the very essence of what generals were expected to do.

Senior military officers were presumed to possess unique expertise in designing campaigns and directing engagements. Not found among mere civilians or even among soldiers of lesser rank, this expertise provided the rationale for conferring status and authority on generals.

In earlier eras, the very structure of wars provided a relatively straightforward mechanism for testing such claims to expertise. Events on the battlefield rendered harsh judgments, creating or destroying reputations with brutal efficiency.

Back then, standards employed in evaluating generalship were clear-cut and uncompromising. Those who won battles earned fame, glory, and the gratitude of their countrymen. Those who lost battles got fired or were put out to pasture.

During the Civil War, for example, Abraham Lincoln did not need an advanced degree in strategic studies to conclude that Union generals like John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, and Joseph Hooker didn’t have what it took to defeat the Army of Northern Virginia. Humiliating defeats sustained by the Army of the Potomac at the Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville made that obvious enough. Similarly, the victories Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman gained at Shiloh, at Vicksburg, and in the Chattanooga campaign strongly suggested that here was the team to which the president could entrust the task of bringing the Confederacy to its knees.

Today, public drunkenness, petty corruption, or sexual shenanigans with a subordinate might land generals in hot water. But as long as they avoid egregious misbehavior, senior officers charged with prosecuting America’s wars are largely spared judgments of any sort. Trying hard is enough to get a passing grade.

With the country’s political leaders and public conditioned to conflicts seemingly destined to drag on for years, if not decades, no one expects the current general-in-chief in Iraq or Afghanistan to bring things to a successful conclusion. His job is merely to manage the situation until he passes it along to a successor, while duly adding to his collection of personal decorations and perhaps advancing his career.

Today, for example, Army General John Nicholson commands U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan. He’s only the latest in a long line of senior officers to preside over that war, beginning with General Tommy Franks in 2001 and continuing with Generals Mikolashek, Barno, Eikenberry, McNeill, McKiernan, McChrystal, Petraeus, Allen, Dunford, and Campbell. The title carried by these officers changed over time. So, too, did the specifics of their “mission” as Operation Enduring Freedom evolved into Operation Freedom’s Sentinel. Yet even as expectations slipped lower and lower, none of the commanders rotating through Kabul delivered. Not a single one has, in our president-elect’s concise formulation, “done the job.” Indeed, it’s increasingly difficult to know what that job is, apart from preventing the Taliban from quite literally toppling the government.

In Iraq, meanwhile, Army Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend currently serves as the — count ’em — ninth American to command U.S. and coalition forces in that country since the George W. Bush administration ordered the invasion of 2003. The first in that line, (once again) General Tommy Franks, overthrew the Saddam Hussein regime and thereby broke Iraq. The next five, Generals Sanchez, Casey, Petraeus, Odierno, and Austin, labored for eight years to put it back together again.

At the end of 2011, President Obama declared that they had done just that and terminated the U.S. military occupation. The Islamic State soon exposed Obama’s claim as specious when its militants put a U.S.-trained Iraqi army to flight and annexed large swathes of that country’s territory. Following in the footsteps of his immediate predecessors Generals James Terry and Sean MacFarland, General Townsend now shoulders the task of trying to restore Iraq’s status as a more or less genuinely sovereign state. He directs what the Pentagon calls Operation Inherent Resolve, dating from June 2014, the follow-on to Operation New Dawn (September 2010-December 2011), which was itself the successor to Operation Iraqi Freedom (March 2003-August 2010).

When and how Inherent Resolve will conclude is difficult to forecast. This much we can, however, say with some confidence: with the end nowhere in sight, General Townsend won’t be its last commander. Other generals are waiting in the wings with their own careers to polish. As in Kabul, the parade of U.S. military commanders through Baghdad will continue.

For some readers, this listing of mostly forgotten names and dates may have a soporific effect. Yet it should also drive home Trump’s point. The United States may today have the world’s most powerful and capable military — so at least we are constantly told. Yet the record shows that it does not have a corps of senior officers who know how to translate capability into successful outcomes.

Draining Which Swamp?

That brings us to the second question: Even if commander-in-chief Trump were somehow able to identify modern day equivalents of Grant and Sherman to implement his war plans, secret or otherwise, would they deliver victory?

On that score, we would do well to entertain doubts. Although senior officers charged with running recent American wars have not exactly covered themselves in glory, it doesn’t follow that their shortcomings offer the sole or even a principal explanation for why those wars have yielded such disappointing results. The truth is that some wars aren’t winnable and shouldn’t be fought.

So, yes, Trump’s critique of American generalship possesses merit, but whether he knows it or not, the question truly demanding his attention as the incoming commander-in-chief isn’t: Who should I hire (or fire) to fight my wars? Instead, far more urgent is: Does further war promise to solve any of my problems?

One mark of a successful business executive is knowing when to cut your losses. It’s also the mark of a successful statesman. Trump claims to be the former. Whether his putative business savvy will translate into the world of statecraft remains to be seen. Early signs are not promising.

As a candidate, Trump vowed to “defeat radical Islamic terrorism,” destroy ISIS, “decimate al-Qaeda,” and “starve funding for Iran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah.” Those promises imply a significant escalation of what Americans used to call the Global War on Terrorism.

Toward that end, the incoming administration may well revive some aspects of the George W. Bush playbook, including repopulating the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and “if it’s so important to the American people,” reinstituting torture. The Trump administration will at least consider re-imposing sanctions on countries like Iran. It may aggressively exploit the offensive potential of cyber-weapons, betting that America’s cyber-defenses will hold.

Yet President Trump is also likely to double down on the use of conventional military force. In that regard, his promise to “quickly and decisively bomb the hell out of ISIS” offers a hint of what is to come. His appointment of the uber-hawkish Lieutenant General Michael Flynn as his national security adviser and his rumored selection of retired Marine Corps General James (“Mad Dog”) Mattis as defense secretary suggest that he means what he says. In sum, a Trump administration seems unlikely to reexamine the conviction that the problems roiling the Greater Middle East will someday, somehow yield to a U.S.-imposed military solution. Indeed, in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, that conviction will deepen, with genuinely ironic implications for the Trump presidency.

In the immediate wake of 9/11, George W. Bush concocted a fantasy of American soldiers liberating oppressed Afghans and Iraqis and thereby “draining the swamp” that served to incubate anti-Western terrorism. The results achieved proved beyond disappointing, while the costs exacted in terms of lives and dollars squandered were painful indeed. Incrementally, with the passage of time, many Americans concluded that perhaps the swamp most in need of attention was not on the far side of the planet but much closer at hand — right in the imperial city nestled alongside the Potomac River.

To a very considerable extent, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, preferred candidate of the establishment, because he advertised himself as just the guy disgruntled Americans could count on to drain that swamp.

Yet here’s what too few of those Americans appreciate, even today: war created that swamp in the first place. War empowers Washington. It centralizes. It provides a rationale for federal authorities to accumulate and exercise new powers. It makes government bigger and more intrusive. It lubricates the machinery of waste, fraud, and abuse that causes tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to vanish every year. When it comes to sustaining the swamp, nothing works better than war.

Were Trump really intent on draining that swamp — if he genuinely seeks to “Make America Great Again” — then he would extricate the United States from war. His liquidation of Trump University, which was to higher education what Freedom’s Sentinel and Inherent Resolve are to modern warfare, provides a potentially instructive precedent for how to proceed.

But don’t hold your breath on that one. All signs indicate that, in one fashion or another, our combative next president will perpetuate the wars he’s inheriting. Trump may fancy that, as a veteran of Celebrity Apprentice (but not of military service), he possesses a special knack for spotting the next Grant or Sherman. But acting on that impulse will merely replenish the swamp in the Greater Middle East along with the one in Washington. And soon enough, those who elected him with expectations of seeing the much-despised establishment dismantled will realize that they’ve been had.

Which brings us, finally, to that third question: To the extent that deficiencies at the top of the military hierarchy do affect the outcome of wars, what can be done to fix the problem?

The most expeditious approach: purge all currently serving three- and four-star officers; then, make a precondition for promotion to those ranks confinement in a reeducation camp run by Iraq and Afghanistan war amputees, with a curriculum designed by Veterans for Peace. Graduation should require each student to submit an essay reflecting on these words of wisdom from U.S. Grant himself: “There never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the sword.”

True, such an approach may seem a bit draconian. But this is no time for half-measures — as even Donald Trump may eventually recognize.

Andrew J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com (“a regular antidote to the mainstream media”), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The Swamp of War Sometimes it’s tough to pull lessons of any sort from our confusing world, but let me mention one obvious (if little noted) case where that couldn’t be less true: the American military and its wars.

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Tomgram: William Hartung, Trump for the Defense As with so much of what Donald Trump has said in recent months, his positions on Pentagon spending are, to be polite, a bundle of contradictions.

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Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, No “New Normal” The night after the election, this long-time pacifist dreamed she shot a big white man carrying an arsenal of guns. He was wandering around a room full of people, waving a pistol and threatening to fire.

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Tomgram: Mattea Kramer, You Don’t Leave Home Without It Not long before Election Day, but thousands of miles away in the Afghan village of Bouz Kandahari, 30 to 36 civilians died (including a significant number of children and infants).

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Tomgram: Nick Turse, America, the Election, and the Dismal Tide It wasn’t to be, but had it been, Hillary Clinton would have become not only the first woman president, but the first president to enter the Oval Office as a lame duck.

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Tomgram: Engelhardt, Through the Gates of Hell The one thing you could say about empires is that, at or near their height, they have always represented a principle of order as well as domination.

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Tomgram: Michael Klare, Whose Finger on the Nuclear Button? Once upon a time, when choosing a new president, a factor for many voters was the perennial question: “Whose finger do you want on the nuclear button?”

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Tomgram: Engelhardt, Resurrecting My Parents From the Dead for Election 2016 To say that this is the election from hell is to insult hell.

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Tomgram: Ann Jones, Donald Trump’s Open Carry Donald Trump grabbed a new lifeline. Speaking at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on October 15th, he raised a hand as if to take an oath and declared: “I am a victim!”

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Tomgram: Nate Terani, One Veteran’s War on Islamophobia Recently, I was asked a question about Kill Anything That Moves, my history of civilian suffering during the Vietnam War. An interviewer wanted to know how I responded to veterans who took offense at the (supposed) implication that every American who served in Vietnam committed atrocities.

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Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Too Big to Fail, Hillary-Style Of a Hillary Clinton presidency, so much less has been written and yet she’s the woman who never saw a bank CEO she couldn’t get a couple of hundred thousand dollars from for giving thoroughly unsurprising speeches.

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Tomgram: William Hartung, The Doctrine of Armed Exceptionalism Here’s the strangeness of it all: America’s wars have been going badly for years in almost every way imaginable across the Greater Middle East and North Africa and yet, the Pentagon’s budget is already coming up roses and no matter who enters the Oval Office, it’s only going to get bigger.

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Tomgram: Gary Younge, America’s Deserving and Undeserving Dead Children On average, seven children a day, about 2,500 a year, are shot to death in this country. Given the availability of guns of every sort here, this should surprise no one.

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Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Perpetual Killing Field Today’s TomDispatch post is a monumental piece of reporting from “the worst place on Earth” and, on a planet where, from Cambodia to Rwanda, people remember the grim slaughter grounds of our recent history, the least noticed “killing fields” around.

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Tomgram: Sandy Tolan, The Death of the Two-State Solution The Obama administration just agreed to a 10-year military aid deal that will give Israel $38 billion dollars in, among other things, America’s most advanced weapons systems. The White House terms it “the largest single pledge of military assistance in U.S. history.”

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Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Finding Hope in Dismal Times Luckily, not everyone has been glued to the screen, eternally watching The Donald. From Black Lives Matter to the climate change movement, activists have, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon points out in a powerful (and powerfully upbeat) new post, never stopped working to make this a better world.

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Tomgram: John Feffer, Slouching Toward the Apocalypse This piece suggests far wilder ways in which Trump couldn’t be more in that same grain, if what you have in mind is the Dr. Strangelovian current that runs through American life, involving evangelicals, apocalyptics, survivalists, and white racists; even his extremity, that is, couldn’t be more us — or, if you prefer, more U.S. This one is an original and definitely a must-read!

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Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Unipolar No More As Dilip Hiro points out in his TomDispatch post today, if you’ve noticed the growing assertiveness of China and Russia, you’ll know that we’re on an increasingly multipolar planet.

Thursday, October 6, 2016 (1 comments) Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Engelhardt, This Is Not About Donald Trump I attempt to take a step back when it comes to the Trump phenomenon and look at what, despite the millions of words pouring out about him, is seldom said or thought much about: the ways in which, unique as this presidential election season may be, Trump himself couldn’t be more in the American tradition — as American, in fact, as a piece of McDonald’s baked apple pie.

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Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, The National Security Void You may have missed it. Perhaps you dozed off. Or wandered into the kitchen to grab a snack. Or by that point in the proceedings were checking out Seinfeld reruns. During the latter part of the much hyped but excruciating-to-watch first presidential debate, Lester Holt posed a seemingly straightforward but cunningly devised question.

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Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, What Actually Keeps Americans Safe We have a vast national security state that remains remarkably helpless when it comes to finding the terrorists in our American world. It is simply incapable of picking those unexpected needles out of the vast haystack of us.

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Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Trump’s Future Piggy Bank, Our Country? As Nomi Prins, author of All the Presidents’ Bankers points out in her latest TomDispatch piece on election 2016, there’s one thing Donald Trump is not prepared to do, whatever the political positions he may espouse: give up what’s best for Donald Trump.

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Tomgram: Nick Turse, Killing People, Breaking Things, and America’s Winless Wars America’s post-9/11 wars have been going on for years and it seems as if, in conflict after conflict, the U.S. military can’t get out of them and can’t win any of them either.

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Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Arresting Our Way to “Justice” More than 2.3 million people are in American jails and prisons at any moment, more than 11 million cycling through them each year.

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Tomgram: Engelhardt, War, Peace, and Absurdity Here’s my version of why, in war and peace, bombing and politics, the stories out of this country these days should boggle our minds.

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Tomgram: Chip Ward, Peace Pipes, Not Oil Pipes With the return of Utah environmentalist Chip Ward to TomDispatch comes a vivid analysis of the latest dramatic oil pipeline battle in the West, the stand-off at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

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Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Class of 2017 — So Sorry! Fifteen years after 9/11, war and possible war are embedded in our American way of life and the public is consumed with safety and security-related fears, of terrorism in particular, that have little basis in reality but have helped immensely to expand our national security state.

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Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Rise of the Right and Climate Catastrophe Today, consider what TomDispatch’s invaluable energy expert Michael Klare has to say about the rise of versions of The Donald globally and what, in climate-change terms, that means for the health of our planet.

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Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, Deportations “R” Us Sometimes, as today at TomDispatch, what’s needed is a little history lesson to remind us that what seems unique in our moment — in this case, Donald Trump’s attitude toward immigrants (whether Mexican or Syrian) — is anything but unique to our time.

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Tomgram: Bill Moyers, Money and Power in America Bill Moyers on how the U.S. became a 1% society — and why democracy and plutocracy don’t mix.

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Tomgram: Engelhardt, A 9/11 Retrospective: Washington’s 15-Year Air War I offer what I hope is a unique 9/11 retrospective for the 15th anniversary of that nightmare: a look at what’s been at the heart of events since that morning — a set of air wars that have gone on fruitlessly and destructively for 15 years and show no signs of ever ending.

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Tomgram: Nick Turse, What the U.S. Military Doesn’t Know (and Neither Do You) What the Pentagon and the U.S. military do matters greatly on this conflicted planet of ours, which is why I regularly find it amazing, even unnerving, that, in a world of monster media organizations, covering what the U.S. military does in Africa — and it’s doing more and more there — has largely been left to Nick Turse of TomDispatch.

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Tomgram: Arlie Hochschild, Trumping Environmentalism TomDispatch takes you on a remarkable journey into the bayous of Louisiana, a world of Tea Party supporters, of an environmental disaster, and of the confounding contradictions of American political life in the midst of Election 2016.

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Tomgram: Ann Jones, “I Didn’t Serve, I Was Used” At TomDispatch today, a powerful piece on how, from Big Pharma to the Koch brothers, vets coming home from America’s wars have been taken to the cleaners.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Todd Miller, The Great Mexican Wall Deception Todd Miller reminds us, Trump supporters shouldn’t feel complete despair if, in the course of this election campaign, The Donald goes down in flames.

Monday, August 22, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Making Sense of Trump and His National Security State Critics Rebecca Gordon takes a clear-eyed look at the Republican national security luminaries who recently signed a letter declaring Donald Trump unfit for the Oval Office (and yes, indeed, he is unfit for office).

Thursday, August 18, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Best of TomDispatch: Andrew Bacevich, Pentagon, Inc. A writer who dares to revisit a snarky article dashed off five-plus years earlier will necessarily approach the task with some trepidation. Pieces such as the one republished below are not drafted with the expectation that they will enjoy a protracted shelf life. Yet in this instance, I’m with Edith Piaf: Non, je ne regrette rien.

Tuesday, August 16, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Judith Coburn, On the Mean Streets of America Step aside, Sam Spade. Move over, Philip Marlowe. You want noir? Skip the famed private eye novels and films of the 1930s and 1940s and turn to our present American world and to neighborhoods where the postman doesn’t ring even once, but the police are ready to shoot more than once, often on the slightest excuse.

Thursday, August 11, 2016 (1 comments) Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: William Astore, Why It’s So Hard for Members of the Military to Speak Out These days, who writes about how little public dissent or criticism of U.S. foreign policy and its disastrous wars comes from those who are at the heart of the process, who should know so much better than the rest of us? In all these years, I’ve seen next to nothing on the subject military dissent in particular.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016 (2 comments) Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Election From Hell Consider this post my attempt to make some sense of what we’re still calling an “election campaign,” although it has by now become more like an all-encompassing way of life and, despite its many “debates” (that now garner National Football League-sized audiences), is also what I label “the tao of confusion.”

Thursday, August 4, 2016 (1 comments) Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, Pseudo-Election 2016 Andrew Bacevich takes a trip back to his childhood — to the 1956 election between Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai Stevenson and offers a particularly clear-eyed look at how, over six decades, American politics at the national level descended into the pathological election campaign of the present moment.

Tuesday, August 2, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The U.S. Military Pivots to Africa and That Continent Goes Down the Drain Things are not exactly going well militarily 15 years after 9/11. The Obama administration will hand over at least seven wars and conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa to the next administration and from Afghanistan to Libya, Somalia, and Nigeria, things are just getting worse.

Monday, August 1, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Guns for Tots Frida Berrigan uses her experiences as a mother with her three young children to explore, in a freewheeling and fascinating way, toy culture, toy guns, the NRA, the weapons industry, and kids (and what we adults can take from such subjects).

Tuesday, July 26, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: William Hartung, How to Arm a “Volatile” Planet So here’s this morning’s puzzle for you: two major U.S. industries make things that go boom in the night: Hollywood and the arms business.

Monday, July 25, 2016 (1 comments) Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Crimes Against the Future In this one, as befits my age, I imagine the world I will, sooner or later, be leaving behind: a destabilizing country and a planet filling with refugees, especially millions of children uprooted from their worlds and lives, deprived often of parents, education, and a childhood.

Tuesday, July 19, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, Letting Tarzan Swing Through History Adam Hochschild recently discovered that the latest reboot of the Tarzan movies, The Legend of Tarzan, was, bizarrely enough, in part based on his classic book King Leopold’s Ghost — on, that is, the colonial nightmare of the Belgian Congo.

Monday, July 18, 2016 (1 comments) Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, How Extrajudicial Executions Became “War” Policy in Washington Rebecca Gordon’s new post is an eye-opening look at how two American administrations changed the nature of war, using the drone to bring extrajudicial executions — presidentially ordered assassinations — into the heartland of American foreign policy.

Thursday, July 14, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Michael Klare, Fossil Fuels Forever Based on the latest yearly report from the U.S. Department of Energy, while renewable forms of energy are growing far faster than anyone expected, so — startlingly enough — is the use of fossil fuels. As a result, it looks like oil, coal, and natural gas will continue to expand and dominate the global energy landscape for decades to come.

Tuesday, July 12, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: William Astore, We Have Met the Alien and He Is Us When we go to the movies, we identify with the outgunned rebels, the underdogs, the liberators, against the alien invaders, the imperial stormtroopers, the Terminators. Here, however, is one retired Air Force lieutenant colonel’s hard won realization that we — the U.S. military in particular — may be the invading “aliens” in much of the world.

Monday, July 11, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Trump Wins (Even If He Loses) Nomi Prins turns to the billionaire who has taken possession of us all. Her focus: his frenetic version of “You’re fired!” this election season and how that’s played out with the Republican establishment, without whom (and without whose money) she doubts he can make it to the Oval Office.

Thursday, July 7, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Where Did the American Century Go? Is this actually the American Century? And concludes that perhaps it’s not, despite the fact that we remain the globe’s “sole superpower.”

Tuesday, July 5, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Revolving Doors, Robust Rolodexes, and Runaway Generals Nick Turse offers a riveting look at what “retirement” means for top commanders in the U.S. military and believe me, if you don’t think public service pays big time, think again.

Thursday, June 30, 2016 (2 comments) Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Thomas Frank, Worshipping Money in D.C. Thomas Frank takes us on an eye-opening tour of the lobbying industry in Washington, a dimly lit corner of “corruption-free America,” a completely legal and remarkably unethical world that comes with its own guidebook: Influence, a newsletter chronicling daily dalliances involving money, alcohol, and political influence.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016 (1 comments) Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Patrick Cockburn, An Endless Cycle of Indecisive Wars As Patrick Cockburn points out in his TomDispatch post today, we have entered “an age of disintegration.” And he should know. There may be no Western reporter who has covered the grim dawn of that age in the Greater Middle East and North Africa.

Monday, June 27, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: John Feffer, Donald Trump and America B John Feffer focuses on the post-Cold War global economy and who it left behind, a group that has no name here but is known in Poland as “Poland B” and is now triumphantly represented in power by a rabid right-wing political party there.

Thursday, June 23, 2016 (1 comments) Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics… and U.S. Africa Command Turse explores the way U.S. Africa Command has seemingly massaged its numbers in testimony to Congress and so evidently managed to disappear piles of its missions on that continent, obscuring the expansion of U.S. military operations there.

Tuesday, June 21, 2016 (4 comments) Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: William Astore, The End of Air Power? air power alone can’t be blamed for the sorry fates of the lands of the Greater Middle East, increasingly descending into chaos and terror, but let’s just say — as retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore does in his new post — that it has proven startlingly incapable of producing any positive results.

Thursday, June 16, 2016 (1 comments) Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Andrew Cockburn, Victory Assured on the Military’s Main Battlefield — Washington Today, Andrew Cockburn, whose recent book, Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (just out in paperback), is a devastating account of how U.S. drone warfare really works, suggests that such results are anything but. Quite the opposite, it represents strategic thinking and maneuvering of the first order and results in the Pentagon regularly taking the budgetary high ground in Washington.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016 Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Ann Jones, Donald Trump Has the Traits of a Wife Abuser and Women Know It Ann Jones makes sense of Donald Trump’s stunningly unfavorable polling numbers among women and why, thanks to what lies behind them, the only billionaire in the running may not, in fact, make it to the White House.

Noam ChomskyMonday, June 13, 2016 (1 comments) Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon
Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, Tick… Tick… Tick… It’s no small horror that, on this planet of ours, humanity continues to foster two apocalyptic forces, each of which — one in a relative instant and the other over many decades — could cripple or destroy human life as we know it.

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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

What must the world think watching the US presidential campaign? Over time US political campaigns have become more unreal and less related to voters’ concerns, but the current one is so unreal as to be absurd.

The offshoring of American jobs by global corporations and the deregulation of the US financial system have resulted in American economic failure. One might think that this would be an issue in a presidential campaign.

The neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony is driving the US and its vassals into conflict with Russia and China. The risks of nuclear war are higher than at any previous time in history. One might think that this also would be an issue in a presidential campaign.

Instead, the issues are Trump’s legal use of tax laws and his non-hostile attitude toward President Putin of Russia.

One might think that the issue would be Hillary’s extremely hostile attitude toward Putin (“the new Hitler”), which promises conflict with a major nuclear power.

As for benefiting from tax laws, Pat Buchanan pointed out that Hillary used to her benefit a loss almost as large as Trump’s and during the Arkansas years Hillary even took a tax deduction for itemized pieces of used clothing donated to a charity, including $2 for one of Bill’s used underpants.

The vice presidential “debate” revealed that the Democratic Party’s candidate is so ignorant that he thinks Putin, who is democratically elected and has enormous public support, is a dictator.

Here is what we know about the two presidential candidates. Hillary has a long list of scandals from Whitewater and Vince Foster to Benghazi and violation of national security protocols. She is bought-and-paid-for by the oligarchs on Wall Street, in the mega-banks, and in the military-security complex as well as by foreign interests. The proof is the Clinton’s $120 million personal fortune and the $1,600 million in their foundation. Goldman Sachs did not pay Hillary $675,000 for three 20-minute speeches for the wisdom they contained.

What we know about Trump is that the oligarchic establishment cannot stand him and has ordered the Ministry of Propaganda, a.k.a., the US media, to destroy him.

Clearly, Hillary is the candidate of the One Percent, and Trump is the candidate for the rest of us.

Unfortunately, about half of the 99 percent is too dumb to know this.

Moreover, if Trump were to end up in the White House, it doesn’t mean he could prevail over the oligarchy.

The oligarchy is entrenched in Washington with control over economic and foreign policy positions, think tanks and other lobbyists, and the media.

The people control nothing.

What does the world think when they see Donald Trump damned because he doesn’t want war with Russia or the American economy moved offshore?

Where in American politics do Washington’s European, British, Canadian, Australian, and Japanese vassals see leadership worthy of their sacrifice of sovereignty and independent foreign policy? Where do they even see a modicum of intelligence?

Why does the world look to the most stupid, vile, arrogant, corrupt and murderous government on the planet for leadership?

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/
Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan Administration. He was associate editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service. He is a contributing editor to Gerald Celente’s Trends Journal. He has had numerous university appointments. His books, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is available here, and How America Was Lost, can be ordered here. His latest book, The Neoconservative ThreatTo International Order: Washington’s Perilous War For Hegemony, can be ordered here.http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/OpEdNews Member for 448 week(s) and 5 day(s)

Wednesday, October 5, 2016Washington Leads The World To War What must the world think watching the US presidential campaign? Over time US political campaigns have become more unreal and less related to voters’ concerns, but the current one is so unreal as to be absurd.

Friday, September 30, 2016Bring Back The Cold War There can be no cooperation between the US and Russia over Syria, because the two government’s goals are entirely different. Russia wants to defeat ISIS, and the US wants to use ISIS to overthrow Assad. This should be clear to the Russians. Yet they still enter into “agreements” that Washington has no intention of keeping.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016Can Russia Learn From Brazil’s Fate? Putin is a careful and thoughtful leader of Russia, but he is not an economist. He has confidence in neoliberal Elvira Nabiulina, Washington’s choice to head the Russian central bank. Nabiuina believes that the assault on the ruble is due to impersonal “global market forces,” not to Washington’s financial clout.

Sunday, September 25, 2016He Who Hesitates Is Lost And Russia Hesitated Russia had a victory for Syria and democracy in its hands, but Putin lacked the decisiveness of a Napoleon or a Stalin and let his victory slip away as a result of false hopes that Washington could be trusted. Now a Russian/Syrian victory would require driving the Turks and Americans out of Syria.

Monday, September 19, 2016Will Russia Surrender? If the Russian government has finally arrived at the conclusion that Washington is determined to destroy political stability in Syria and to replace it with chaos, it has taken a long time. The Russian government has studiously avoided this conclusion, because once diplomacy is acknowledged as useless, force confronts force. In today’s context that means thermo-nuclear war and the end of life on Earth.

Sunday, September 18, 2016Russia Has No Partners In The West It is a mystery that the Russian government believes Washington and Moscow have any common interest in the outcome in Syria. Washington’s interest is to remove Assad and put Syria into the chaos that rules in Libya and Iraq. Russia’s interest is to stabalize Syria as a bulwark against the spread of jihadism. the Russian government thinks Washington is a “partner” with whom it has common interests. Go figure.

Friday, September 16, 2016Western Media Credibility In Free Fall Collapse As the print and TV media in the 21st century are firmly aligned with the government, the trust in government spills over into trust of the media that is serving the government. As the generation of Democrats enculturated with this mythology die off, Democratic trust rates will plummet toward Republican levels.

Saturday, September 10, 20169/11: 15 Years Of A Transparent Lie 9/11 was used by the US government to launch wars that have destroyed in whole or part seven countries, killing millions of peoples and producing millions of refugees. 9/11 was also used to create an American police state, which is a far greater threat to freedom and democracy than Muslim terrorism.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016The Tide is Turning: The Official Story Is Now The Conspiracy Theory The US government has plentiful video evidence of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon but refuses to release the evidence that it says support its story. Similarly, the French federal government has prohibited Nice authorities from releasing the security camera videos of the Nice truck attack and has ordered the video evidence destroyed. How can we believe governments that refuse to show us the hard evidence?

Monday, September 5, 2016Labor Day? Today we have one party with two heads. The competition between the parties is about which party gets to be the prostitute for the capitalists for the next political term. As Democrats and Republicans swap the prostitute function back and forth, neither party has an incentive to do anything different.

Friday, September 2, 2016About The Dumbed-Down New York Times When a country’s newspaper of record is only a propaganda organ, what becomes of public discourse? What happens to the ability of free speech to constrain the government and to hold government accountable to the truth? Obviously, these foundational principles of American democracy cannot be performed by a media that serves as a ministry of propaganda.

Wednesday, August 31, 2016Are You a Mind-Controlled CIA Stooge? With the public mind programmed to ridicule “conspiracy kooks,” even in the case of suspicious events such as 9/11, the government can destroy evidence, ignore prescribed procedures, delay an investigation, and then form a political committee to put its imprimatur on the official story.

Monday, August 29, 2016Can Americans Overthrow The Evil That Rules Them? That it was the Democrats — allegedly the party of the people — who first took the choice away from the people is astonishing. Much information indicates that Bernie Sanders actually won the Democratic presidential nomination but was denied it by vote fraud and “super delegates.” This is politics in America — totally corrupt. Chris Hedges might be right: nothing can change without revolution.

Friday, August 26, 2016The US: A Dead Nation Walking It is in times of tension that false warnings are believed and miscalculations occur. In the interest of life on earth, Washington should be de-escalating tensions with Russia, not building them. So far there is no sign that the Neoconservatives are willing to give up their hegemonic agenda for the sake of life on earth.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016Hats Off To Mother Jones Republicans learned to use libertarian “free market” ideologues in order to feather their own nests. Privatization, favored by libertarians, is the Republican way of turning public functions into million dollar businesses for themselves and their friends. In the case of the armed forces, the privatized parts of the US military are multi-billion dollar businesses.

Monday, August 22, 2016The Genocide of a Land Justice is not a thriving characteristic of the Israeli government, US foreign policy, or the media. The United Nations has produced report after report documenting the extermination of a people, but is powerless to act because of Washington’s veto. Propaganda is turning truth-tellers into “conspiracy theorists” and “domestic extremists.”

Sunday, August 21, 2016The Aleppo Poster Child Let us not forget that Washington’s determination to overthrow the Syrian government has brought many deaths to Syrians of all age groups. Washington alone is responsible for the deaths. The evil Obama regime has stated over and over that “Assad must go” and is prepared to destroy the country and much of the population in order to get rid of him.

Sunday, August 21, 2016Can Russia Survive Washington’s Challenge? Erdogan will not want to align with Russia if he thinks Russia is not up to Washington’s challenge. Erdogan sees Putin endlessly asking for Washington’s cooperation, and Erdogan understands that Washington sees this as a sign of Russian weakness. The real danger for Russia lies in Russia’s desire for Western acceptance. As long as Russians have this desire, they are a doomed people.

Friday, August 19, 2016What Became of the Left? Today we need a left-wing far more desperately than we did when we had one. Today governments considered democratic have the powers of a dictatorship. In the United States, for example, habeas corpus has been erased from both law and Constitution. Even worse, White House officials can create lists of citizens to be murdered without due process of law. These are the powers of a dictator.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016Will Human Evil Destroy Life On Earth? The environmental destruction, together with hunting or poaching by those who regard it as manly or profitable to kill a magnificent animal, is leading to the rapid extermination of this beautiful animal. Soon tigers will only exist as exhibits in zoos. The same is happening to lions, cheetahs, leopards, rhinos, elephants, bobcats, wolves, bears, birds, butterflies, honey bees. You name it.

Friday, August 12, 2016Rethinking The Cold War … and the new one Americans are Creatures of The Matrix created by their own propagandists. Americans see imaginary threats, not real ones. What the Russians and Chinese see are a people too brainwashed and ignorant to be of any support for peace. They see war coming and are preparing for it.

Thursday, August 11, 2016Russia’s Weakness Is Its Economic Policy Despite these overt hostile moves against Russia, Russian neoliberals still believe that the economic policies that Washington urges on Russia are in Russia’s interest, not intended to gain control of its economy. Hooking Russia’s fate to Western hegemony under these conditions would doom Russian sovereignty.

Thursday, August 11, 2016The Stench of Raw Propaganda In Iraq Washington was fighting ISIS, because ISIS was overthrowing Washington’s puppet in Iraq. However, in Syria Washington was supporting ISIS, often characterizing ISIS as “moderates” fighting to bring democracy to Syria. Now that ISIS is on the verge of total defeat in Syria, Washington’s whores among the “experts” want Russia punished for blocking Washington’s overthrow of Syria.

Wednesday, August 10, 2016How Long Can Economic Reality Be Ignored? The reason that Americans have no income from their savings is that public authorities put the welfare of a handful of “banks too big to fail” above the welfare of the American people. The enormous liquidity created by the Federal Reserve has gone into the financial system where it has driven up the prices of financial instruments. There has been a stock market recovery but not an economic recovery.

Saturday, August 6, 2016Another Phony Jobs Report Even if we assume that 255,000 jobs were created in July, the news remains bad, because the jobs claimed are mainly lowly paid part time jobs without benefits and provide insufficient income to support an independent existence. This is why so many employed young people continue to live at home with their parents.

Friday, August 5, 2016Behold, a Pale Horse; its Rider’s Name Was Death…and Hell Followed Him Where is the question: “Why, Mr. President, did Washington introduce 15 years of massive and ongoing violence into the Middle East and then expect us to believe that it was the fault of someone else?” If Helen Thomas were there, she would ask the relevant questions. But the American press corps are merely an audience that validates the false reality spun by Washington by accepting it without question.

Thursday, August 4, 2016Fissures in the Empire Washington has raised the cost of being a member of its Empire too high. Vassals such as France and Germany are beginning to exercise independent policies toward Russia. Observing the cracks in its Empire, Washington has decided to bind its vassals to Washington with terror.

Wednesday, August 3, 2016American Horror Story: How Democrats Found A Russian Boogeyman In Hillary’s E-MailsDemocrats are looking for a boogeyman, for somebody to shift the blame away from them. They don’t even realize that their allegations make Russia look like a cyber superpower. Well, Russia may be a cyber superpower, but we all know that Clinton’s e-mails did not reach WikiLeaks via Russia. It’s just something Clinton operatives made up.

Monday, August 1, 2016Human Rights Watch Reports That US Government Tortured Children The “beacon of hope” is now recklessly and irresponsibly threatening two nuclear powers — Russia and China — with military encirclement justified with the most blatant and transparent lies. We hear the propaganda 24/7. Even the “liberal” NPR specializes in telling lies about Russia. Is it hopeful to convince two nuclear powers that the US is preparing to attack?

Friday, July 29, 2016The Democratic Party No Longer Exists How long can Russia, and China, wait before they conclude that they have to pre-empt the coming attack from Washington? Does anyone, even stupid Americans, think that once Russia and China are convinced that they are targets for attack that they will just sit there and await the attack?

Wednesday, July 27, 2016Is Europe Doomed By Vassalage To Washington? If the European peoples can come to their senses, free themselves from The Matrix that Washington has imposed on them, and revolt against Washington’s agents who control them, the European peoples can save their own lives and the lives of the rest of us.

Tuesday, July 26, 2016The Atlantic Council: The Marketing Arm of the Military/Security Complex The zionist neocons get away with their warmongering because it is profitable for the US military/security complex. Whereas the crazed neocons want real war, the military/security complex only wants the propaganda threat of war. In capitalist regimes everything is for sale: honor, integrity, justice, truth. Everything is reduced to the filthy lucre.

Monday, July 25, 201630 Seconds To Midnight The mere existence of nuclear weapons means the nonexistence of life on earth. It will happen sooner or later. To raise the risk as the crazed American government is doing with irresponsible provocations of the Russians and Chinese is the ultimate criminal act. There is no greater threat to human rights than to endanger all life.

Sunday, July 24, 2016Armageddon Approaches Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has expressed his frustration with Washington’s reliance on force and coercion instead of diplomacy. It is reckless for Washington to convince Russia that diplomacy is a dead end without promise. When the Russians reach that conclusion, force will confront force.

Friday, July 22, 2016JFK Turned to Peace and Was Assassinated once in the Oval Office, Kennedy witnessed the extreme risks that US military leadership was willing to impose on American lives in behalf of a war than no one needed. He realized that the US military-security complex was as great a threat to life as the Soviets. He understood that tensions between the two nuclear powers had to be defused, not increased.

Friday, July 22, 2016French Anti-Terrorist Police Demand Destruction Of Nice Evidence Whenever you see evidence withheld, destroyed, and demands for destruction of evidence as the French Anti-Terrorist police are demanding of city authorities in Nice, the safest conclusion is that the evidence is damning for the official story.

Thursday, July 21, 2016Is the Saudi 9/11 Story Part Of The Deception? The official 9/11 story has taken too many hits to remain standing. The collapse of Building 7, which, if memory serves, was not mentioned at all in the 9/11 Commission Report, has been proven to have been a controlled demolition. Building 7 collapsed at free-fall acceleration, which can only be achieved with controlled demolition.

Tuesday, July 19, 2016The Police Are Victimized By Their Training Killings by police have gone on too long. The killings are too gratuitous, and the police have largely escaped accountability for actions that, if committed by private citizens, would result in life imprisonment or the death penalty. There has been no accountability, because the police unions and the white community rush to the defense of the police.

Monday, July 18, 2016Nice Brings To Mind Operation Gladio It looks like a permanent state of martial law in France will be one consequence. This shutdown of society will also dispose of the protests against capitalist puppet Hollande’s repeal of France’s labor protections. Those protesting the take-back of their hard-earned rights will be closed down under the martial law.

Sunday, July 17, 2016MH-17: Russia Convicted By Propaganda, Not Evidence Only Washington, whose presstitutes can be relied on to control the explanations for Washington, and Washington’s vassal in Kiev had anything to gain from downing the airliner. Whether intentional or an accident, the downing of MH-17 was used to blacken Russia and to convince the EU to go along with Washington’s economic sanctions and military moves against Russia.

Sunday, July 17, 2016Washington Is Politicizing The Olympics Again Washington and its Canadian vassal are trying to use a Western media-created Russian athletic doping scandal to ban Russian participation in the Olympic games in Brazil. Washington and Canada are pressuring other countries to get on board with Washington’s vendetta against Russia. The vendetta is conducted under the cover of “protecting clean athletics.”

Wednesday, July 13, 2016Gestapo America Comey wants the unconstitutional power to demand from the providers of telephone and Internet services all records and information about you. These demands are not to be subject to oversight by courts, and the communication companies that serve you are prohibited from telling you that all of your information has been given to the FBI.

Tuesday, July 12, 2016Vladimir Putin Is The Only Leader The West Has Putin does not want war. He is doing everything in his power to avoid it. But Putin is not going to surrender Russia to Washington. The trip-point of World War III will be the installation of Washington’s missiles in Poland and Romania. Whatever the evil men and women in Washington who are gambling with the life of the planet think, Russia is not going to accept these missiles.

Monday, July 11, 2016Police Murder Because They Are Trained To Murder We know that the police have been, or are being, militarized. They are armed with weapons of war that hitherto have been used only on battlefields. We don’t know why police are armed in this way, as such weapons are not necessary for policing the American public and are not used in police work anywhere except in Israeli-occupied Palestine.

Sunday, July 10, 2016Why Dallas Happened Police violence is also out of control because of the revolution in police training which teaches police to protect themselves and to subdue the suspect regardless of cost. A number of former police officers have told me that the reason they gave up the occupation is that today police are being trained to be killers like soldiers.

Friday, July 8, 2016Are You Planning Your Retirement? Forget About It. You Won’t Survive To Experience It.After squandering many of Russia’s opportunities in hopes of diplomacy, Vladimir Putin now sees the West for what it is: An immoral, power-crazed entity that will destroy the planet before it gives up its goal of hegemony over the entirety of the Earth. Why should the “indispensable, exceptional people” settle for anything less than hegemony over the world?

Thursday, July 7, 2016Voters Have Heavy Responsibility In November The Democratic Party, formerly a defender of the common man, now competes with the Republican Party as an agent of the One Percent. Jimmy Carter was the last Democrat, and Ronald Reagan the last Republican, whose concerns encompassed ordinary folks.

Thursday, July 7, 2016More Obscuration From The British Establishment Sir John Chilcot’s assigned task under the guise of an “impartial inquiry” was to absolve former UK PM and war criminal Tony Blair not of all responsibility but of all responsibility deserving of prosecution. Sir John’s report is akin to FBI director Comey’s report on Hillary: They did it but they didn’t do it enough to be prosecuted.

Sunday, July 3, 2016This Is How They Protect Us! This is America today. We are forced to pay for our own brutilization by a criminal element that has taken refuge in “security” that “protects us.” We are in far more danger from the security forces allegedly protecting us than we are from terrorists. Indeed, the security forces are the terrorists.

Sunday, July 3, 2016America Destroyed When I was young, America still existed. No more. Not even the blather from the 4th of July can hide the obvious fact. The young do not know that they have lost their country, because they are born into a time when the country is lost. To them that is normalcy. They are too busy texting, often intimately, on social media to be aware of the fate that awaits them, lost as they are in their insouciance.

Wednesday, June 29, 2016The Collapse of Western Democracy The view now established in the West is that the people are not qualified to make political decisions. The position of the opponents of Brexit is clear: it simply is not a matter for the British people whether their sovereignty is given away to an unaccountable commission in Brussels. Martin Schultz, President of the EU Parliament, puts it clearly: “It is not the EU philosophy that the crowd can decide its fate.”

Saturday, June 25, 2016Despite the Vote, the Odds Are Against Britain Leaving the EU Enough of the British people resisted the brainwashing and controlled debate to grasp the real issues: sovereignty, accountable government, financial independence, freedom from involvement in Washington’s wars and conflict with Russia. The British people should not be so naive as to think that their vote settles the matter. The fight has only begun.

Friday, June 24, 2016The Brexit Vote The coming attack on the British economy is the reason that Leave supporters such as Boris Johnson are mistaken in their belief that there is “no need for haste” in exiting the EU. The longer it takes for the British to escape from the authoritarian EU, the longer Washington and the EU can inflict punishment on the British people for voting to leave.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016Brexit: What Is It About? The intent of the EU is for the British, French, Germans, Italians, Greeks, Spanish, and all the rest to disappear as peoples. Brexit is the last chance to defeat this hidden agenda, and apparently the British will vote tomorrow without having a clue as to what is at stake and what the vote is about.

Tuesday, June 21, 2016Orlando Wrap-up We know that governments lie in order to serve their agendas. To mention only a few recent proven government lies: the Gulf of Tonkin North Vietnamese attack on a US Navy ship, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Iranian nukes, Russian invasion of Ukraine. These lies are monstrous. A government will lie on smaller scales as well, such as Orlando, Boston, San Bernandino.

Monday, June 20, 2016If You Value Life, Wake Up! Washington is putting its nuclear missiles on Russia’s borders, conducting war games on Russia’s borders, and stationing its Navy off Russia’s coasts in the Black and Baltic seas. To cover up its reckless, irresponsible aggression toward a nuclear power, Washington accuses Russia of aggression.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016Orlando Shooting: Still No Evidence Remember, our purpose is not to disprove the official story, but to find evidence in its behalf. So far all we have are official statements and testimony by what seem to be crisis actors. 103 people cannot be shot without there being real evidence. It has to be somewhere.

Monday, June 13, 2016Orlando Shooting What is most troublesome about these shootings is that the story seems already prepared by the government and is immediately set. We are fed the story before there is time for investigation by government or media. The media never investigate. The media just repeat the government’s story over and over until it is set in everyone’s mind. Contrary evidence is just discarded.

Sunday, June 12, 2016Frustrations of Telling the Truth All of my life I have confronted the vast bulk of humanity living in a false reality created by self-serving powerful interest groups and the government that they control. People believe the lies that define their reality, because they lack the education and the emotional and intellectual strength to confront the obvious lies.

Thursday, June 9, 2016Where Do Matters Stand? Ever since Russia stood up to Obama over Syria, the Russians have been experiencing hostile propaganda and military operations on their borders. These provocations are justified by Washington and its NATO vassals as a response to “Russian aggression.” What is the purpose of the lie other than to prepare the Western peoples for war with Russia?

Last Jan. 26, unnoticed in the sound and fury of the presidential primary season, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that its famous Doomsday Clock would remain at 3 minutes to midnight (=global catastrophe): “As the signatories to this reportmake clear, the Earth remains perilously and inexcusably close to metaphorical midnight.”The Bulletin was first published in 1945 by scientists who had helped develop the atomic bomb. In 1947 The Bulletin began using the image of a Doomsday Clock to symbolize how close nuclear weapons technology had brought us to the destruction of civilization. They have since included the threat from human-induced global warming. The only other years the clock was this close to midnight were in 1949 when the Soviets acquired their atomic bomb, in 1953 when the U.S. and USSR acquired the hydrogen bomb, and in 1984 when cold-war tensions were at their peak.

The start of the Doomsday Clock signaled a new era in human history: one in which humans had acquired the power to destroy their planet but lacked the wisdom and institutions that would make its use unlikely. That’s why the clock was set from the start at the final minutes of the last hour, and since then never earlier than 17 minutes before midnight. What now alarms the Bulletin’s panel of scientific experts (including 16 Nobel Laureates ) is a combination of rising tensions among nuclear powers and the inadequate international response to accelerating climate change.

Climate Change

Seashore flooding and increasing weather extremes make it hard to ignore the threat from climate change. According to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’s annual State of the Climate report, in 2015 greenhouse gases, global land and sea surface temperatures and global sea levels were the highest on record.

The latest international attempt to address global warming was the Paris Agreement signed on Earth Day by the leaders of 175 nations. Unfortunately, as the New York Times points out, the agreement will not have the legal force of a treaty because it would “be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill without the required two-thirds majority vote in the Republican-controlled Senate.” Of all the major political parties in the democratic world, only the GOP rejects climate science.

Republicans have nominated for President a climate-change denier who has shown himself to be a narcissistic man-child. They also want him to be commander-in-chief of U.S. nuclear forces. The GOP is a major threat to human survival.

Nuclear War

On August 6, 1945 the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It instantly killed 70,000 people, and 140,000 more died from radiation effects. The city of 310,000 was obliterated. A second atomic bomb on August 9 caused similar devastation in Nagasaki. The first bomb had an explosive power of 15 kilotons (=15,000 tons of TNT), while the second was 22 kilotons. The estimated totaldestructive force of the current nuclear arsenal is 570,000 kilotons (570 megatons) for the U.S. and 660+ megatons for Russia, equal to 38,000 and 44,000 Hiroshimas respectively.

According to the Arms Control Association, the world’s nuclear powers now possess a total of 15,300 nuclear warheads, 90% of which are held by the U.S. and Russia. About a third of these are retired and await dismantlement. Each nation has about 4500 warheads stockpiled for potential use. Russia has 1648 warheads deployed on ballistic missiles or heavy bombers, while the U.S. has 1538. Each side maintains a “nuclear triad” consisting of land-based ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and strategic bombers.

It’s a terrible irony that we nearly ended the threat of a nuclear doomsday 30 years ago at the 1986 Reykjavk summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Both offered to completely eliminate their nuclear arsenals, and then backed off. The obstacle was Reagan’s refusal to limit the development of his so-called Star Wars anti-ballistic missile system even though the elimination of the missiles would make the system unnecessary.

The kind of irrationality that led to the failure of the Reykjavk summit is now at work in U.S. foreign policy toward Russia. The immediate background of the current threat is the American-sponsored expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia, incorporating many former Warsaw Pact countries. NATO even announced that Ukraine, despite its deep historic and economic ties with Russia, would be considered for membership.

As Noam Chomsky put it recently: “One can imagine how the United States would react if the Warsaw Pact were still alive, most of Latin America had joined, and now Mexico and Canada were applying for membership.”

In 2013 the U.S. supported a coup that ousted the democratically elected Ukrainian President Yanukovych, replacing him with a Western-leaning regime. This was the last straw for Russian President Putin. He responded by annexing Crimea, an ethnically Russian part of Ukraine that included port facilities for the Russian Black Sea fleet. He also supported a separatist insurrection in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine that continues today.

The American narrative from politicians and the mainstream media is that Russia is an aggressor that needs to be contained by economic sanctions and military threats. NATO is moving military forces close to the border with Russia, and Russia is responding with its own troop movements. There is a growing acceptance of a New Cold War.

Instead of urgently pushing for nuclear arms reduction, President Obama (winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) has committed to a trillion-dollar renewal program for the U.S. nuclear triad. It envisions weapons and delivery systems that “move toward the small, the stealthy and the precise” ( NYT , 1/11/16). The Russians have noticed, and are scrambling to catch up. The Doomsday Clock is ticking.

I’m a retired philosophy professor at Centre College. I also am a regular columnist for The Danville Advocate-Messenger,the local paper in what was my home town (I now live in Connecticut. My last book was Posthumanity-Thinking Philosophically (more…)

s the wars of the world rage on into 2016, the powder keg now appears to be ‘Syraq’ and not Ukraine. One day, perhaps too late, we as a country will recognize that some of our ‘friends’ are our ‘enemies,’ and some of our ‘enemies’ are really our allies. But as long as we pursue the politics of Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies, we’re squandering our life force in the creation of more and more chaos.

In this dangerous election cycle, Republicans and Democrats continue to talk loudly — of muscle, power, and the exercise thereof. But since Vietnam, it’s equally clear we’re scared of putting boots on the ground in any significant way (500,000 went to Vietnam), as casualties are anathema to the electorate, who prefer the Empire’s use of proxy armies, and covert/soft power.

But as long as Russia continues to maintain and refine its nuclear capabilities (at about 1/5th our cost), those who actually think must understand we can’t force them into submission where their national interests are concerned, i.e., Eastern Ukraine, their borders with Europe, and terrorism against Russia, etc. Without that nuclear capacity, there is no doubt Russia would’ve rendered Edward Snowden to the United States long ago.

Having suffered through two Chechen wars, the mass execution of schoolchildren at Beslan, the Moscow theatre attack, etc., and with the largest Muslim population in Europe, terrorism is a huge issue to Russia. How much closer is ‘Syraq’ to their borders than ours? Russia well knows the US has been supporting several of these terrorist groups against them, starting with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan back in the 1980s, and that we’re now supporting Turkey and Saudi Arabia and their proxy groups, including ISIS, as well as several other organizations. Throw in mercenary Chechens in several countries, fascist groups in Ukraine; as well as NATO-aided, right-wing groups in Poland, the Baltic Republics, etc. While we continue to play Red Riding Hood’s grandma-in-wolf’s-clothing, our media consistently denies we’re the Big Bad Wolf in this affair — ‘who me?’ In response, Russia, despite sanctions against it and a withering propaganda onslaught, has only hardened its muscle back to 1941 levels. They’re ready for the worst. This is so dangerous. Why?

Below are 5 excellent analyses showing us the details of a US strategy that allows us to understand the frightening stakes of USA/EU/NATO against Russia/Iran/Syria, reaching a tipping point in a gigantic battle for energy resources — the 21st century Mid-East resembling the 1914 Balkans; this could bloom, like a Ponzi scheme, into a war that ultimately engulfs the rest of the world.

The most unstable particle in this fury is this damned 2016 circus of an American election. Emotions are most easily excited, dumb things about our weaknesses and strengths are said and believed by the electorate. Nor has our media really given us insight into what the Russian point of view really is, although Putin has stated it on several occasions. We keep insisting it’s the restoration of the Cold War Russian Empire — which Putin has repeatedly condemned, saying it didn’t work THEN and it won’t work NOW. He’s deplored the fallacy of Communism. Meanwhile, we don’t seem to understand or empathize with the true size of the terrorist threat against Russia.

We should be remembering in a time of possible all-out war, when most people seem to have forgotten what war is like, that it’s not Russia, the EU, the Mid-East, or Ukraine which have the most to lose. It’s the USA — us. Most of us would lose our lives, and we’d certainly lose our economy, and generally a way of life that’s spoiled us since WW2. I keep wondering WHY do we keep pushing for “regime change” and dominion over other lands? We never back down, it seems. There’s no end to the zombie hunger for more control. Nothing changes in our system of ill will towards any resisters, going back to the Philippines in the early 1900s.

But am I naïve to think, as bad as our rhetoric and propaganda have gotten, that the military-industrial complex in our country is not so NUTS as to set off a real hot war — when we have the most to lose? Remember the senselessness of World War I. Will we be asking ourselves the same question about ‘Syraq’ one day? How did this start? Why?

In closing, I pray that I turn out to be as wrong as I was about Ukraine at the end of 2014, and that we’ll all still be communicating at this time next year. Let’s hope so… Let’s hope sanity prevails in 2016.

That’s the amount of money 158 families—and the companies they own or control—have already contributed to Republican and Democratic presidential candidates.1$176 million—that’s half of the total funds contributed thus far in the 2016 presidential race.2

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First, let me thank the World Peace Council (WPC) and the Cuban Movement for Peace and Sovereignty of the Peoples (MovPaz), Regional Coordinator of the WPC for America and the Caribbean, for planning and hosting the 4th International Seminar for Peace and Abolition of Foreign Military Bases.

I am honored to speak at this conference specifically about the need to abolish United States military bases in the Caribbean, Central and South America. First, let me state on behalf the delegations from the United States, and particularly our delegation with CODEPINK: Women for Peace, we apologize for the continuing presence of the U.S. Naval Base here in Guantanamo and for the U.S. military prison that has put a dark shadow over the name of your beautiful city of Guantanamo.

We call for the closing of the prison and the return of the U.S. naval base after 112 years to the rightful owners, the people of Cuba. Any contract for use of land in perpetuity signed by a puppet government of the beneficiary of the contract cannot stand. The U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo is not necessary for U.S. defense strategy. Instead, it harms U.S. national defense as other nations and people see it for what it is — a knife in the heart of the Cuban revolution, a revolution the United States has attempted to overthrow since 1958.

I want to recognize the 85 members of the various delegations from the United States — 60 from CODEPINK: Women for Peace, 15 from Witness Against Torture and 10 from United National Anti-War Coalition. All have been challenging policies of the U.S. government for decades, particularly the economic and financial blockade of Cuba, the return of the Cuban Five and return of the land of the naval base of Guantanamo.

Secondly, I am an unlikely participant in today’s conference due to my near 40 years of working in the United States government. I served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel. I was also a U.S. diplomat for 16 years and served in U.S. Embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia.

However, in March 2003, I was one of three U.S. government employees who resigned in opposition to President Bush’s war on Iraq. Since then, I, as well as most everyone on our delegation, have been publicly challenging policies of the Bush and Obama administrations on a variety of international and domestic issues including extraordinary rendition, unlawful imprisonment, torture, assassin drones, police brutality, mass incarceration, and U.S. military bases around the world, including of course, the U.S. military base and prison in Guantanamo.

I was last here in Guantanamo in 2006 with a CODEPINK delegation that held a protest at the back gate of the US military base to close the prison and return the base to Cuba. Accompanying us was one of the first prisoners to be released, a British citizen, Asif Iqbal. While here we showed to almost one thousand persons in the large movie theater in Guantanamo city and to members of the diplomatic corps when we returned to Havana, the documentary movie “The Road to Guantanamo,” the story of how Asif and two others came to be imprisoned by the United States. When we asked Asif if he would consider coming back to Cuba on our delegation after three years of imprisonment, he said, “Yes, I would like to see Cuba and meet Cubans — all I saw when I was there were Americans.”

The mother and brother of a still imprisoned British resident Omar Deghayes joined our delegation, and I will never forget Omar’s mother looking through the fence of the base asking: “Do you think Omar knows we are here?” The rest of the world knew she was as international TV broadcasting from outside the fence brought her words to the world. After Omar was released a year later, he told his mother that a guard told him that his mother had been outside the prison, but Omar, not surprisingly, didn’t know whether to believe the guard or not.

After nearly 14 years of imprisonment in Guantanamo prison, 112 prisoners remain. 52 of them were cleared for release years ago and are still held, and incomprehensibly, the U.S. maintains that 46 will be imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial.

Let me assure you, many, many of us continue our struggle in the United States demanding a trial for all prisoners and the closing of the prison in Guantanamo.

The sordid history of the past 14 years of the United States imprisoning 779 persons from 48 countries on a U.S. military base in Cuba as a part of its global war “on terror” reflects the mentality of those who govern the United States — global intervention for political or economic reasons, invasion, occupation other countries and leaving its military bases in those countries for decades.

Now, to speaking about other U.S. bases in the Western Hemisphere — in Central and South America and the Caribbean.

The 2015 U.S. Department of Defense Base Structure Report states that the DOD has property in 587 bases in 42 countries, the majority located in Germany (181 sites), Japan (122 sites), and South Korea (83 sites). The Department of Defense classifies 20 of the overseas bases as large, 16 as medium, 482 as small and 69 as “other sites.”

These smaller and “other sites” are called “lily pads” and are generally in remote locations and are either secret or tacitly acknowledged to avoid protests that might lead to restrictions on their use. They usually have a small number of military personnel and no families. They sometimes reply on private military contractors whose actions the U.S. government can deny. To maintain a low profile, the bases are hidden within host country bases or on the edge of civilian airports.

In the past two years I made several trips to Central and South America. This year, 2015, I travelled to El Salvador and Chile with School of the Americas （SAO) Watch and in 2014 to Costa Rica and earlier this year to Cuba with CODEPINK: Women for Peace.

As most of you know, School of the Americas Watch is an organization that has documented by name many graduates of the U.S. military school initially called School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), who have tortured and murdered citizens of their countries who opposed their governments’ oppressive policies-in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina. Some of the most notorious of these murderers that sought asylum in the United States in the 1980s are now being extradited back to their home countries, particularly to El Salvador, interestingly, not because of their known criminal acts, but for violations of U.S. immigration.

Over the past 20 years, SOA Watch has held an annual three-day vigil attended by thousands at the new home of SOA at the U.S. military base at Fort Benning, Georgia, to remind the military of the horrific history of the school. Additionally, SOA Watch has sent delegations to countries in Central and South America asking that the governments stop sending their military to this school. Five countries, Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua have withdrawn their military from the school and due to extensive lobbying of the U.S. Congress, SOA Watch came within five votes of the U.S. Congress closing the school. But, sadly, it is still open.

I want to recognize 78-year-old JoAnn Lingle who was arrested for challenging the School of the Americas and sentenced to two months in U.S. federal prison. And I would also like to recognize everyone in our U.S. delegation who has been arrested for peaceful, non-violent protest of U.S. government policies. We have at least 20 from our delegations who have been arrested and gone to jail for justice.

This year the SOA Watch delegation, in meetings with the President of El Salvador, a former FMLN Commandante, and the Minister of Defense of Chile, asked that those countries stop sending their military personnel to the school. Their responses highlight the web of U.S. military and law enforcement involvement in these countries. The President of El Salvador, Salvador Sanchez Ceren, said that his country was slowly reducing the number of military sent to U.S. schools, but he could not totally cut ties to the U.S. school due to other U.S. programs on combating drugs and terrorism, including the International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) built in El Salvador, after public rejection of the facility being housed in Costa Rica.

ILEA’s mission is “combating international drug trafficking, criminality, and terrorism through strengthened international cooperation.” However, many are concerned that aggressive and violent police tactics so prevalent in the United States would be taught by U.S. instructors. In El Salvador, police approaches toward gangs is institutionalized in the “mano duro or hard hand” approach to law enforcement which many say has backfired on police with gangs becoming more and more violent in a response to police. Tactics. El Salvador now has the reputation of “murder capital” of Central America.

Most do not know that a second U.S. law enforcement facility is located in Lima, Peru. It is called the Regional Training Center, and its mission is “expanding the long-term liaison relationships among foreign officials to combat international criminal activity and by supporting democracy by stressing the rule of law and human rights in international and domestic police operations.”

On another trip with SOA Watch, when we visited Jose Antonio Gomez, the Minister of Defense of Chile, he said had received many requests from other human rights groups to sever ties with the U.S. military school and that he has asked the Chilean military to provide a report on the need to continue sending personnel to it.

However, the overall relationship to the U.S. is so important that Chile accepted $465 million from the United States to build a new military facility called Fuerte Aguayo purportedly to enhance training in military operations in urban areas as a part of peacekeeping operations. Critics say that the Chilean military already had facilities for peacekeeping training and that the new base is to give the U.S. larger influence in Chilean security issues. Chileans hold regular protests at this facility and our delegation joined in one of those vigils.

Reacting to the Fort Aguayo installation, the Chilean NGO Ethics Commission against Torture wrote about the U.S. role in Fuerte Aguayo and Chilean citizens’ protest against it: “Sovereignty rests with the people. Security cannot be reduced to protection of the interests of the trans-nationals… The armed forces are supposed to protect national sovereignty. Its bending to the dictates of the North American army constitutes treason to the homeland.” And, “People have the legitimate right to organize and to demonstrate publicly.”

The annual military exercises the United States conducts with most countries in the Western Hemisphere should be added to the issue of foreign military bases as the exercises bring large numbers of U.S. military to the region for long periods using on a “temporary” basis the military bases of the host countries.

In 2015 the U.S. conducted six major regional military exercises in the Western Hemisphere. When our delegation was in Chile in October, the U.S. aircraft carrier George Washington, a mobile U.S. military base itself with dozens of aircraft, helicopters and landing craft, and four other U.S. warships were in Chilean waters practicing maneuvers as Chile hosted the annual UNITAS exercises. The navies of Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, New Zealand and Panama were also participating.

Long term individual contacts between military leaders, active duty and retired, is another aspect of military relationships we must consider along with the bases. While our delegation was in Chile, David Petraeus, retired U.S. four star general and disgraced head of the C.I.A., arrived in Santiago, Chile for meetings with the head of the Chilean Armed Forces underscoring the continuous relationships from the military to retired officers who have become private military contractors and informal messengers of U.S. administration policies.

Another aspect of U.S. military involvement is its civic action and humanitarian assistance programs in road, school construction and medical teams providing health services in hard to reach locations in many Western Hemisphere countries. Seventeen U.S. State National Guard units have long-term military-to-military partnerships with defense and security forces in 22 nations in the Caribbean, Central America and South America. This U.S. National Guard State Partnership Program focuses in great measure on civic action projects that happen so frequently that U.S. military are continuously in countries, using host country military bases as their own during the projects.

U.S. military bases in the Western Hemisphere

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — Of course, the most prominent U.S. military base in the Western Hemisphere is in Cuba, several miles from here — the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Station which has been occupied by the U.S. for 112 years since 1903. For the past 14 years, it has housed the infamous Guantanamo military prison in which the U.S. has imprisoned 779 persons from around the world. Only eight prisoners of the 779 have been convicted — and those by a secret military court. And, 112 prisoners remain of which the U.S. government says that 46 are too dangerous to try in court and will remain in prison without trial.

Other U.S. military bases in the Western Hemisphere outside the United States include:

Joint Task Force Bravo — Soto Cano Air Base, Honduras. The U.S. has intervened or occupied Honduras eight times–in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919,1920, 1924 and 1925. The Soto Cano Air Base was built by the United States in 1983 as a part of the network of the CIA-military support to the Contras, who were attempting to overthrow the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. It is now used as a base for U.S. civic action and humanitarian and drug interdiction projects. But it has the airfield used by the Honduran military in 2009 coup from which to fly the democratically elected President Zelaya out of the country. Since 2003, Congress has appropriated $45 million for permanent facilities. In two years between 2009 and 2011, the base population grew by 20 percent. In 2012, the U.S. spent $67 million in military contracts in Honduras. There are more than 1,300 U. S. military and civilians on the base, four times larger than the 300 person Honduran Air Force Academy, the nominal host of the American military “guests.”

The U.S. has increased military aid to Honduras despite the increase in police and military violence in the deaths of tens of thousands in Honduras.

Comalapa — El Salvador. The naval base was opened in 2000 after the U.S. military left Panama in 1999 and the Pentagon needed a new forward operating location for maritime patrol to support multi-national counter illicit drug trafficking missions. Cooperative Security Location (CSL) Comalapa has a staff of 25 permanently assigned military personnel and 40 civilian contractors.

Aruba and Curacao — The two Dutch territories in the Caribbean islands have U.S. military bases that are tasked with combating narco-ships and aircraft and which originate in South America and subsequently pass through the Caribbean to Mexico and the U.S. The Venezuelan government has argued that these bases are utilized by Washington to spy on Caracas. In January 2010 a U.S. surveillance P-3 aircraft left Curacao and trespassed Venezuelan airspace.

Antigua & Barbuda — The U.S. operates an Air Station in Antigua that has housed the C-Band radar that tracks satellites. The radar is to be moved to Australia, but the U.S. may continue to have a small air station.

Andros Island, Bahamas –The Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC) is operated by the U.S. Navy on six locations in the islands and develops new naval military technology, such as electronic warfare threat simulators.

Colombia — Two US DOD locations in Colombia are listed as “other sites” and on page 70 of the Base Structure Report and should be considered as remote, isolated “lily pads.” In 2008, Washington and Colombia signed a military agreement in which the U.S. would create eight military bases in that South American nation to combat drug cartels and insurgent groups. However, the Colombian Constitutional Court ruled that it was not possible for non-Colombian military personnel to be permanently stationed in the country, but the U.S. still has U.S. military and DEA agents in the country.

Costa Rica — One US DOD location in Costa Rica is listed as “other sites” on page 70 of the Base Structure Report — another “other site” “lily pad,” even though the Costa Rican government denies a U.S. military installation.

Lima, Peru — A U.S. Naval Medical Research Center #6 is located in Lima, Peru at the Peruvian Naval hospital and conducts research on and surveillance of a wide range of infectious diseases that threaten military operations in the region, including malaria and dengue fever, yellow fever, and typhoid fever. Other overseas U.S Naval Research Centers are located in Singapore, Cairo and Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

To close my presentation, I want to mention one other part of the world where the U.S. is increasing its military presence. In December, I will be a part of a Veterans for Peace delegation to Jeju Island, South Korea and to Henoko, Okinawa where new military bases are being constructed for the U.S. “pivot” to Asia and the Pacific. As join with citizens of those countries to challenge their governments’ agreement to allow their land to be use to expand the worldwide U.S. military footprint, we acknowledge that besides violence toward humans, military bases contribute strongly to violence toward our planet. Military weapons and vehicles are the most environmentally dangerous systems in the world with their toxic leaks, accidents, and deliberate dumping of of hazardous materials and dependence on fossil fuels.

Our delegation thanks the conference organizers for the opportunity to be with you and others from around the world who are deeply concerned about foreign military bases and we pledge our continued efforts to see the closing of the U.S. Naval Base and prison in Guantanamo and U.S. bases around the world.

Ann Wright is a 29 year US Army/Army Reserves veteran who retired as a Colonel and a former US diplomat who resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. In December, 2001 (more…)

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Anne Frank was a prospective refugee to the United States — and we denied her family’s request for entry.

Many know Anne Frank from her famously written experiences of her time spent hiding from the Nazis in the 1940s. It is less known (or realized) that her father, Otto, desperately attempted to get a U.S. visa to escape from Europe.

Documents released in 2007 by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which were heavily publicized and covered by several media outlets at the time, show Otto’s efforts to escape to the United States or Cuba.

Otto’s attempts over nine months are documented in several letters, some of which he wrote to his friend from college, Nathan Straus Jr. Straus was the head of the federal Housing Authority, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s and the son of a Macy’s co-owner. In the letters, Otto asks his friend to put up a $5,000 bond. But even with these close connections to some powerful people, the Frank family could not overcome the State Department’s restrictions. The Roosevelt administration added a restriction in 1941 that no refugee with close relatives in Europe could come to the U.S.

After this avenue didn’t seem to be working, Otto then attempted to secure an individual visa from Cuba, which succeeded at first. The visa was canceled 10 days after Germany declared war on the United States.

The next year the family was forced to go into hiding after Anne’s sister, Margot, received an order to report to one of the work camps.

“You must not be selfish and you must share whatever you have and help in a desperate situation. They need help from you.

“These people have had the courage to do a very difficult thing — to take your family and your whole life to another country requires bravery and strength. This is history repeating itself.

“These Syrians are valuable, educated people. These are doctors and nurses who are only too willing to help our society and they will become leaders in the community if you let them.”

Although the documents were discovered in 2007, the issue of Anne Frank’s family being denied visas has been brought to light this week again afterseveral U.S. governors have stated that they will deny refugees from Syria entry into the U.S. due to “security concerns.”

As stated in a previous article on NationofChange, the identified terrorists responsible for the attacks in Paris earlier this month, were all European nationals, and not refugees or posing as such. Yet, the Paris attacks have still prompted many around the world, especially in the U.S., to tighten security and turn away thousands of fleeing, desperate people.

An Islamic State militant waves his group’s flag as he and another celebrate in Fallujah, Iraq. (Photo: AP)

Pundits and politicians are already looking for a convenient explanation for the twin Middle East disasters of the rise of Islamic State and the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria. The genuine answer is politically unpalatable, because the primary cause of both calamities is U.S. war and covert operations in the Middle East, followed by the abdication of U.S. power and responsibility for Syria policy to Saudi Arabia and other Sunni allies.

The emergence of a new state always involves a complex of factors. But over the past three decades, U.S. covert operations and war have entered repeatedly and powerfully into the chain of causality leading to Islamic State’s present position.

The causal chain begins with the role of the U.S. in creating a mujahedeen force to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Osama bin Laden was a key facilitator in training that force in Afghanistan. Without that reckless U.S. policy, the blowback of the later creation of al-Qaida would very likely not have occurred. But it was the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that made al-Qaida a significant political-military force for the first time. The war drew Islamists to Iraq from all over the Middle East, and their war of terrorism against Iraqi Shiites was a precursor to the sectarian wars to follow.

The actual creation of Islamic State is also directly linked to the Iraq War. The former U.S. commander at Camp Bucca in Iraq has acknowledged that the detention of 24,000 prisoners, including hard-core al-Qaida cadres, Baathist officers and innocent civilians, created a “pressure cooker for extremism.” It was during their confinement in that camp during the U.S. troop surge in Iraq 2007 and 2008 that nine senior al-Qaida military cadresplanned the details of how they would create Islamic State.

The Obama administration completed the causal chain by giving the green light to a major war in Syria waged by well-armed and well-trained foreign jihadists. Although the Assad regime undoubtedly responded to the firebombing of the Baath Party headquarters in Daraa in mid-March 2011 with excessive force, an armed struggle against the regime began almost immediately. In late March or early April, a well-planned ambush of Syrian troops killed at least two dozen soldiers near the same city. Other killings of troops took place in April in other cities, including Daraa, where 19 soldiers were gunned down.

During the second half of 2011 and through 2012, thousands of foreign jihadists streamed into Syria. As early as November 2011, al-Qaida was playing a central role in the war, carrying out spectacular suicide bombings in Damascus and Aleppo. Obama should have reacted to the first indications of that development and insisted that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar keep external arms and military personnel and funding out of Syria in order to allow a process of peaceful change to take place. Instead, however, the administration became an integral part of a proxy war for regime change.

Seymour Hersh reported last year that an unpublished addendum to the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi revealed a covert CIA operation to arm Syrian rebels, in cooperation with Sunni allies’ intelligence services. In early 2012, Hersh reported, following an agreement with Turkey, then-CIA Director David Petraeus approved an elaborate covert operation in which Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar would fund the shipment of weapons to Syrian rebels from stocks captured from the Gadhafi government. The scheme employed front companies set up in Libya to manage the shipments of arms in order to separate the U.S. government from the operation. An October 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report released by the Department of Defense to Judicial Watchconfirmed the shipments of Libyan weapons from the port of Benghazi to two Syrian ports near Turkey beginning in October 2011 and continuing through August 2012.

A larger covert program involved a joint military operations center in Istanbul, where CIA officers worked with Turkish, Saudi and Qatari intelligence agencies that were also providing arms to their favorite Syrian rebels groups, according to sources who talked with The Washington Post’s David Ignatius.

By November 2012, al-Qaida’s Syrian franchise, al-Nusra Front, had 6,000 to 10,000 troops—mostly foreign fighters—under its command and was regarded as the most disciplined and effective fighting force in the field. The CIA’s Gulf allies armed brigades that had allied themselves with al-Nusra—or were ready to do so. A Qatari intelligence officer is said to have declared, “I will send weapons to al-Qaeda if it will help” topple Assad.

The CIA officials overseeing the covert operation knew very well what their Sunni allies were doing. After the U.S. shipments from Benghazi stopped in September 2012 because of the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post there, a CIA analysis reminded President Obama that the covert operation in Afghanistan had ended up creating a Frankenstein monster. Even the now-famous account in Hillary Clinton’s 2014 memoirs about Obama rejecting a proposal in late 2012 from CIA Director Petraeus for arming and training Syrian rebels does not hide the fact that everyone was well aware of the danger that arms sent to “moderates” would end up in the hands of terrorists.

Despite this, after rejecting Petraeus’ plan in 2012, Obama approved the covert training of “moderate” Syrian rebels in April 2013. As the Pentagon has been forced to acknowledge in recent weeks, that program has been a complete fiasco, as the units either joined al-Nusra or were attacked by al-Nusra. Meanwhile, as Vice President Joe Biden pointed out in October 2014, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were pouring “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons” into Syria that were ending up in the hands of the jihadists.

Unfortunately, Biden’s complaint came two and a half years too late. By October 2014, more than 15,000 foreign fighters, including 2,000 Westerners, were estimated to have gone to Syria. Islamic State and al-Nusra Front emerged as the two major contenders for power in Syria once Assad is overthrown, and the Saudis and Qataris were now ready to place their bets on al-Nusra. In early 2015, after King Salman inherited the Saudi throne, the three Sunni states began focusing their support on al-Nusra and its military allies, encouraging them to form a new military command, the “Army of Conquest.” The al-Nusra-led front then captured Idlib province in March.

Obama, focusing on the Iran nuclear agreement, has given no indication that he is troubled by his allies’ approach. If the Bush administration destabilized Iraq in order to increase U.S. military presence and power in the Middle East, the Obama administration has countenanced a proxy war that has destabilized and Syria because of his primary concern with consolidating the U.S. alliances with the Saudis and the other Sunni regimes.

Although it has been almost a rigid rule that pundits must ascribe U.S. fealty to its Saudi alliance to oil interests, oil is far from the top of the list of U.S interests today. More important to our national security state is the interest of the Pentagon and the military services to protect the military bases they have in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE. Their need to preserve those alliance relationships is intensified by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) cornucopia of military contracts for U.S. arms manufacturers that assures enormous profits will continue to flow for the foreseeable future. One estimate of the total at stake for the Pentagon and its private allies in military relationships with the GCC is $100 billion to $150 billion over two decades.

Those are crucial bureaucratic and business stakes for the U.S. national security state, which is usually driven by the bottom lines associated with different courses of action. Especially given the administration’s lack of a coherent geopolitical perspective on the region, the security state’s interests offer a persuasive explanation for Obama’s effectively farming out the most important element of its Syria policy to regional allies, with disastrous results.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of five books, the latest book,“Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare,” was published in February 2014. He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.

U.S. Marines occupy Baghdad in front of the Al Fanar hotel that housed Voices activists throughout the Shock and Awe bombing in 2003. (Photo: WNV/Iraq Peace Team)

Before the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing in Iraq, a group of activists living in Baghdad would regularly go to city sites that were crucial for maintaining health and well-being in Baghdad, such as hospitals, electrical facilities, water purification plants, and schools, and string large vinyl banners between the trees outside these buildings which read: “To Bomb This Site Would Be A War Crime.” We encouraged people in U.S. cities to do the same, trying to build empathy for people trapped in Iraq, anticipating a terrible aerial bombing.

Tragically, sadly, the banners must again condemn war crimes, this time echoing international outcry because in an hour of airstrikes this past Saturday morning, the U.S. repeatedly bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, a facility that served the fifth largest city in Afghanistan and the surrounding region.

U.S./NATO forces carried out the airstrike at about 2AM on October 3rd. Doctors Without Borders had already notified the U.S., NATO and Afghan forces of their geographical coordinates to clarify that their compound, the size of a football field, was a hospital. When the first bombs hit, medical staff immediately phoned NATO headquarters to report the strike on its facility, and yet strikes continued, at 15 minute intervals, until 3:15 a.m., killing 22 people. 12 of the dead were medical staff; ten were patients, and three of the patients were children. At least 37 more people were injured. One survivor said that the first section of the hospital to be hit was the Intensive Care Unit.

“Patients were burning in their beds,” said one nurse, an eyewitness to the ICU attack.”There are no words for how terrible it was.” The U.S. airstrikes continued, even after the Doctors Without Borders officials had notified the U.S., NATO and Afghan military that the warplanes were attacking the hospital.

Taliban forces do not have air power, and the Afghan Air Force fleet is subordinate to the U.S., so it was patently clear that the U.S. had committed a war crime.

The U.S. military has said that the matter is under investigation. Yet another in an endless train of somber apologies; feeling families’ pain but excusing all involved decision makers seems inevitable. Doctors Without Borders has demanded a transparent, independent investigation, assembled by a legitimate international body and without direct involvement by the U.S. or by any other warring party in the Afghan conflict. If such an investigation occurs, and is able to confirm that this was a deliberate, or else a murderously neglectful war crime, how many Americans will ever learn of the verdict?

War crimes can be acknowledged when carried out by official U.S. enemies, when they are useful in justifying invasions and efforts at regime change.

One investigation the U.S. has signally failed to carry out would tell it how much Kunduz needed this hospital. The U.S. could investigate SIGAR reports (“Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction”) numbering Afghanistan’s “U.S. funded health care facilities,” allegedly funded through USAID, which cannot even be located, 189 alleged locations at whose coordinates there are demonstrably no buildings within 400 feet. In their June 25th letter they astoundingly write, “My office’s initial analysis of USAID data and geospatial imagery has led us to question whether USAID has accurate location information for 510—nearly 80 percent—of the 641 health care facilities funded by the PCH program.” It notes that six of the Afghan facilities are actually located in Pakistan, six in Tajikstan, and one in the Mediterranean Sea.

It seems we’ve created yet another ghost hospital, not out of thin air this time but from the walls of a desperately needed facility which are now charred rubble, from which the bodies of staff and patients have been exhumed. And with the hospital lost to a terrified community, the ghosts of this attack are, again, beyond anyone’s ability to number. But in the week leading up to this attack, its staff had treated 345 wounded people, 59 of them children.

Now the region has no hospital at all.

The U.S. has long shown itself the most formidable warlord fighting in Afghanistan, setting an example of brute force that frightens rural people who wonder to whom they can turn for protection. In July of 2015, U.S. bomber jets attacked an Afghan army facility in the Logar Province, killing ten soldiers. The Pentagon said this incident would likewise be under investigation. No public conclusion of the investigation seems ever to have been issued. There isn’t always even an apology.

This was a massacre, whether one of carelessness or of hate. One way to join the outcry against it, demanding not just an inquiry but a final end to all U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, would be to assemble in front of health care facilities, hospitals or trauma units, carrying signage which says, “To Bomb This Place Would Be a War Crime.” Invite hospital personnel to join the assembly, notify local media, and hold an additional sign which says: “The Same Is True in Afghanistan.”

We should affirm the Afghans’ right to medical care and safety. The U.S. should offer investigators unimpeded access to the decision makers in this attack and pay to reconstruct the hospital with reparations for suffering caused throughout these fourteen years of war and cruelly manufactured chaos. Finally, and for the sake of future generations, we should take hold of our runaway empire and make it a nation we can restrain from committing the fathomlessly obscene atrocity that is war.

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